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In the first chapter of The Message, Coates speaks in the first person and addresses the reader as “you.” The chapter is ostensibly a letter, addressed to “Comrades.” Coates states that he returned to Howard University to teach writing in 2022. The first chapter is addressed to one of his classes of students during that time. Throughout the chapter, Coates discusses the power and importance of writing.

Coates explains that even as a baby, he would become delighted when his father would play a record by the civil rights poetry and musical group The Last Poets. He became fascinated by rhythm and rhyme schemes, which transferred to a love of hip hop music. Coates references a line from the song “Lyrics of Fury” by Erik B. and Rakim: “I haunt if you want, the style I possess. I bless the child, the earth, the gods and bomb the rest.” Coates focuses on the word “haunt” and the thought that some things are not easily forgotten: words and art linger in the back of people’s minds. The lyrics initially lingered in Coates’s mind due to their rhythm and sound, but he shifts his story to a time when the content of a story haunted him.

Coates then describes reading an issue of Sports Illustrated magazine when he was a boy, long before the internet. He was initially drawn to the cover story, which featured NFL running back Tony Dorsett. Coates describes reading the magazine as a magical experience since it was before the internet gave us capabilities that we now take for granted. For instance, he couldn’t rewatch or read about Tony Dorsett’s triumphs on a whim, as he is possible now. Rather, he would have to wait for them to be broadcast again.

Coates recalls, a seven-year-old, reading a Sports Illustrated article that had a profound impact on him. It about Darryl Stingley, a wide receiver, who was paralyzed after being tackled in 1978. The story described Stingley’s experience, waking up in the hospital, unable to move. Coates was terrified by the concept of paralysis and wanted to know more. While he was able to learn a bit about Stingley’s injury, he was left to accept that the physical brutality of football had consequences. This discovery shed light on a new idea for Coates: “Evil did win sometimes—maybe most times.”

Coates remarks that “bad things” started to happen to him and those around him as he grew older. While the Stingley article had initially disillusioned him, Coates states that stories became an escape from the unpleasant parts of reality. As he grew older, Coates became interested in Shakespeare and eventually attended Howard University, where he decided to become a writer.

Coates quotes a passage from Frederick Douglass and states that “to imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act.” Coates claims that for Black writers, addressing humanity is a tradition. Coates describes writing as drawing a map to a forest. He wants the map to be so detailed that it draws the reader into the forest itself. To draw the map effectively, one must travel through the area. A person has to have the world experiences and not just conjecture from a study. Coates states that the writer’s job is to clarify, to create a “world made clear.”

Coates discusses the need to examine the standards that have been passed down and how they need to evolve. Writers should study the stories that have already been told and how they are a part of the systems that everyone accepts. Then, new writers must write new stories that “make people feel all that is now at stake.”

At the end of the chapter, Coates addresses the reader again, as if he is speaking to his writing students. He states that he has been traveling for two years (Senegal, South Carolina, and Palestine), but he has returned to write his deferred assignment. He plans to write “on language and politics, on the forest, on writing.” 

Next section II. On Pharaohs

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